I'm obtaining leads at $6 a pop but losing money - should I keep doing it?

If I were you I would change something up... It will take a lot of subs before you make the $10 a piece off of them.

If it starts converting... then great keep it coming.

But if it's not converting, you need to change something. Don't keep sending traffic to something that's not getting you results.

Yes.

These figures are pure fiction. There's no way of knowing, or working out, that information at all. It's no more realistic than what people say about a list being worth $1 per subscriber per month, and that one's absolutely idiotic.

What matters is what they're worth to you, right here, right now, and the answer appears to be "nothing measurable yet". So if it were me, I'd immediately stop paying $6 for them.

If I am understanding correctly, you have already pissed away $1800? If so, stop!

You should always start with inexpensive leads, until you have a proven profitable sales funnel. Only when you have seen some success with cheaper leads should you advance to the more expensive leads.

If you are not profiting from your advertising, you need to fix the problem before moving forward. You should always at least break-even from these transactions, and 300 clicks is more than enough to know whether your campaign has the potential to make your money back for you.

$6 a pop? For a lead? How high is your product price? Hopefully it's high, cause you're going to need a high end backend product to make up for your losses.

If you're bringing in leads at $6 a lead... for every 100 subscribers, that's $600. Then you gotta look at conversion rate from your email newsletter. If you convert 5% (5 people for every 100), and you're selling your product for $100... that's $500 - you're still losing money on the frontend. This is why you need a backend product to make up for the losses.

How much is your product price? I personally couldn't deal with getting leads at $6 a pop... i want more like 50 cents a pop. You can lower your lead costs with some good free marketing though.

You're losing money...stop!!

Well first off, its not super clear how much you are losing or where you are getting the traffic from. If you are paying $6 per lead, just go to the traffic source and be like, "Dude, your leads are working but they are only worth $4 to me, I gotta stop if we can't make it work at $4." Then they will be like "I gotta do $4.75 or it doesn't work" so then be like "$4.50" they will be like ok most likely. Now you are making money! Even if you are purely breaking even or slight loss, like a few cents per lead, that is ok if its the best you can do. Growing your business is never bad even if it means no profits in the short term.

Don't be super into cheap leads, I can get you 10,000 leads at $0.25ea if you want but I doubt you will be pleased with their quality for whatever you are doing. Some niches require expensive leads, ie Mortgage refinancing... it takes the right people and the right info collected to make that work. So Maybe your leads at $6 is a great deal but your funnel is bad or something is wrong with your products pitch. We really don't know from the info you provided.

Specifically for that exact same niche I pay an average of 35 cents for pure-blooded U.S. leads.

You don't have a squeeze page, you have a sales letter. A squeeze page should have a benefit driven headline, what they will get for signing up and the optin form. Everything should be above the fold.

Any scrolling it is a salesletter. Get the opt-in then go for the sale with a oto or a download page for the offer.

Offering a cheap $7 product could be the way to go to recover your losses. Send out the offer to your entire list as a broadcast email

You never should run campaigns that bring no profits but just let you throw money down the drain. Try to redesign the squeeze page. One of my best techniques is to write just three bold line of text and let the ebook cover do the work for me. Share it on social media sites for starting, you will get around 50 signups, but this serves to see if your page converts well. If it does, promote it and check profits and loss.

If you want to see some examples, PM me.

See you soon and good luck!
Alessandro

First of all, 300 visitors with no sales is not really something to base a decision off of, especially if you're price point is in the hundreds of dollars.

At that price point, if you're trying to market to cold traffic (which you are if you're using Adwords), you should focus on having a squeeze page first that gets the lead and then try selling them immediately after they opt-in with some upsells (could be your main offer as the first upsell they see).

You'll not only get way more leads, which will reduce your lead cost, but they'll be more likely to buy, as well as give you more chances to sell to them.

A lot of people don't realize that higher priced products don't convert as high as others think. I've heard people say that a 10% conversion rate on a $500 product to cold traffic is their goal, which is insanely high and unrealistic.

Plus you'll need to base your decision on a lot more than just 300 clicks with a product priced that high.

Brian

You have two choices.

Get leads for cheaper, or increase the value of each lead.

Actually.. There's another choice.

You can continue what you're doing and go out of business.



Hope this helps.

Keep testing and switch things up till you start making a profit. I would not continue to invest so much time for no results.

There are some good responses to your problem.

However you are going to have to make a choice yourself.

I would not want $6 a lead for my business, you can get much cheaper even on facebook with testing.

I would stop and test something else...its too much. Plus you need a funnel in the background once you have your lead, that is key to getting the most ROI % per lead.

But there is a shelf life for this costing, meaning if you are not backing yourself up and making back profits quickly, you will have a very dead account soon.

Hope it helps.

There's a TON of confusion and bad information in this thread. Let's start by getting facts straight:

1. Are you paying $6/subscriber or $6/visitor? The difference is SUBSTANTIAL, $6/visitor is crazy high, $6/subscriber might be a little high but not incredibly so depending on the types of subscribers you're talking about a lot of well qualified subscribers could be worth a lot more than that. In other words are you paying $1 (approx.) per visitor or $6/visitor, I'm guessing the former.

2. As Alexa pointed out a subscriber is worth nothing in and of itself, it is worth something based on the sales context/funnel and what that context is able to net you from them, right now based on results you're saying they are worth nothing to you, of course it sounds like you've got 300*18% = 54 subscribers, which isn't much to be able to tell how it's working or not

3. If your first product is $100 I'd say it's too high, you want to insert a lower cost first sale to convert them into customers and then sell them something more expensive. This isn't required of course but you'll get a much better idea of where you're at and probably recoup some of your money. For example, right after the opt-in try selling them something simple for $7 and see how much you can convert. If say you were getting a 10% conversion (not at all unrealistic) then you'd have sold 5.4 copies, let's call it $40 in sales and at least recouped part of your $300 (approx.) in marketing costs (assuming my assumptions above are correct). From there you can try doing a better job of marketing and selling a $100 product or even a $47 product (have you split tested different price points, I imagine not given the low quantities of traffic). With a large enough sales funnel you could do alright.

Bottom line, please help us get the facts straight including traffic source, cost per visitor, conversion rates, and available sales funnel.

Absolutely not. You need a high end or high converting offer to profit while paying that much.

keep testing. as for your sales page i think it'd be useful to mimic the top gravity clickbank products.

Such a high conversion rate would generally indicate that the offer/sales copy was presented to a well-targeted market. Were your 300 visitors from that market? Doesn't appear to be the case. If they had been, even a 9% conversion would have yielded 27 sales.

At $6 a pop and zero conversion rate, I would say STOP - NOW! You need to get your demographics sorted out. If you were told or think that these leads are interested in your offer - "real world" evidence is clearly telling you otherwise.

Find your REAL market then start spending big bucks on lead.

Don't buy into the nonsense that make concrete assumptions about the value of email leads. The value of an email lead is based on a huge number of variables (quality of the prospect behind the email, the quality and nature of your offer and product or service, quality of your relationship with your prospects, and a hundred other subtle variables).

I have leads purchased three years ago that spend hundreds of dollars a year. Yet other leads never make a purchase. There are industry average out there and in nearly all cases the "lifetime" value of a good lead is far greater than $10. However, you can only begin getting good leads once you have identified your REAL market audience. Downside about buying leads - you don't know to a certainty how they were acquired.

You stated.."This should mean that I'm actually making $4 per lead as we speak, although I'm not seeing any of that money yet."

Huh???? You ever work on Wall Street or maybe the government?

If you not converting or profiting then you need to re-work your funnel until you are at least breaking even. $6 per lead is way too high especially if you're not profiting.

I am thinking your offer sucks or they would buy it. Why don't you send yor traffic to another offer of the same type.

$6 a pop for leads is outrageous. You got to trim that down.

I will not spend that much for a lead without any a tangible returns in terms of money coming in.

Unless if you don't mind losing them.

I suggest for you to find another means of finding leads at a reasonable price.

You may try "fiverr.com". But you have to filter the good service providers from the mediocre ones.

Good luck.

If you're losing money and it's not getting you anywhere, stop doing it and make some changes.

you will keep losing your money ,try something different

just look at this from another angle:

- would you personally buy your product? does it help you somehow?
- who would be interested into your product? where is your market?
- are the leads you get the right people interested into your product?
- try to involve them into some free actions: poll etc. Give them some free stuff to read/download. Any results? None? don't spend a penny more for these leads.

If it were me, I wouldn't. I've bought leads for my services, and the maximum I pay is $1-$2 a lead, and I need good conversions coz I know at what % my services convert. Guess the problem here is that you don't know that.

Maybe you should try with cheaper leads (based on your budget), tweak your sales page and increase your conversion %. Then, you'll be able to say if the leads your buying are worth it or not.

You're spending too much for an unproven funnel - unless your name is David DeAngelo!

I would stop at once.

Might sound harsh but you don't know what you are doing and you won't learn anything by keeping it up.

Give the money to charity and take a step back and analyze, learn and do small, low-cost tests. My sincere suggestion is that you don't ask others for answers, for example of where to get low-cost leads, what to push, what blueprint to follow. That's like asking someone at a roulette table what number is hot.

IM isn't a technique.

Make a simple squeeze page and only a big headline and a big button, with an e-mail text box.

I have one simple squeeze page which has about 40%-50% conversion rate, and the headline shows benefits clearly.

Seems simple to me:

How much do you earn per lead? Is it more than $6? There is your answer.

Couldn't disagree more with some of the advice in this thread.

If these leads are targeted/qualified and you're building a list, why are you purely focussing on a $100 singular product ?

As an aside, I would seriously consider changing your primary offer/product if it's not converting but that aside....

It's quite common in business to "make a loss" up front if there's a qualified back-end in place that turns upfront loss into profitability.

We routinely make an instant up front loss on paid traffic and turn it into 3x upfront costs within 50 days with a back-end.

Note "qualified" is the caveat, pissing money up against the wall for leads with no proven metrics is a recipe for disaster.

My advice to you would be this.

1) Create a thank you page for these op-tins and immediately offer something for sale on that page.

If they turned down the primary offer, then offer a cut down version of this $100 product or a pay in instalments type deal. These people are qualified, they've read your sales copy, opted in for more information, they are ripe for the picking. Try it / test it.

2) Now start thinking about building the relationship with these leads. They may be worth a fortune, they may be worth jack shit. You need to start building a rapport to find out. Send them information that is going to either solve one of their problems or partially solve the only problem - help them.

Then start to backend sell them similar products.

There's no right or wrong answer to this question, you could be sitting on a goldmine at $6 a lead or $60 a lead, you need to work the backend, the relationship and your OTO.

If you don't have a viable backend, or there's no affiliate program available, find a partner who does, contact them, tell them the situation, say you want a discount code for their product for your customers. Tell them you'll split it 50/50. So your customers get $10 off with the code and you get $10 in your pocket.

If you have a variety of products you can promote, you should consider retargeting and test that as well.

Place different pixels on the opt-in thank you page to the order page, so you're not offering products they already purchased.

Synopsis, think long term about the value of your leads, it's not about the $6, it's about what you can turn that $6 in to.

Holy moly, I average 70 cents to we'll say 2 dollars per lead. And this is with super targeted traffic. I'v gotten leads for under 50 cents before and again its much better than pinterest traffic. Can't compare it to pinterest really because pinterest is ok at best. People are there playing around and photo sharing so your numbers are a lot higher.

Hi,
How good is your offer? What you should be thinking is "are there a lot of freebie seekers on my list?" You said you give away a lot of stuff. I would say, you are paying too much money for your leads. Is it a reliable solo ad broker? You need to focus on a quality give away.
Good luck to you with your business.
Geri

A lack of profit is like a cancer. If it carries on it will eventually kill you!

$6 per email submit... not w0rth